Score

Details:

for flute and mezzo-soprano
Duration: 9 minutes

Commission/Premiere:

Lilah Senibaldi (flute) and Rebekah Mansfield (mezzo-soprano)
on October 18, 2017 at the University of Tennessee Contemporary Music Festival in Knoxville, TN

PROGRAM NOTES:

Quantum sheep is the name given to a form of poetry. The poetry is generated by a random process implemented by writing words on the backs of sheep, then allowing the sheep to mingle.

The project was inspired by watching sheep below the Roman Wall, with coloured marks on their backs, moving across the fields like the cloud shadows. The sheep and clouds reflected each other. Quantum Sheep celebrates three main principles of Quantum Theory:

1. Randomness, which is at the heart of the universe (the 14 sheep move randomly to create over 80 billion poems),
2. Duality (the metaphorical duality of clouds and sheep); and
3. The influence of the observer on the observed (the onlookers making sense of the formation, creating their own versions of the poems with punctuation & line-breaks).